A travel backpack easily carries all your stuff while letting you navigate airports, subway stations, and city streets.
After traveling with travel backpacks for years across dozens of countries, we recommend the new versions of Osprey’s Farpoint 55 and Fairview 55 travel packs.
These bags fit everything we need for trips ranging from just a week to months of continuous travel. They come with a sizable daypack and are even airline-carry-on friendly.
They’re also highly adjustable and well padded, meaning that not only can you get a perfect fit, but the packs will also remain easy to carry and comfortable to wear for long treks, even if there are stairs, cobblestones, or narrow alleys in your way.
Our pick
Comfortable, adjustable, and carry-on capable, the Farpoint has everything we needed for a week, or even months, of travel.
Comfortable, adjustable, and carry-on capable, the Fairview has everything we needed for a week, or even months, of travel.
I traveled with a Farpoint 55 for years, across dozens of countries for months at a time. In 2023, Osprey released new incarnations of the Farpoint 55 and the sized-for-smaller-torsos Fairview 55.
These new versions mostly kept what we liked about the previous ones and fixed what we didn’t. Best of all, they’re among the least expensive travel backpacks available. After several years as runner-ups, the packs are once again our top picks.
The front of the main pack still unzips like a suitcase, so you can easily fit and access a week’s worth of clothes and toiletries. The daypack, which attaches to the front of the larger pack, has room for camera gear, daily essentials, and a small laptop (via a built-in sleeve). The main pack’s straps can tuck behind a zippered flap, so they won’t catch on anything if you check your luggage.
The best change: The main packs are now overhead-bin-sized for most airlines. (You’ll have to use the daypack as your underseat bag.) Other notable updates include height-adjustable shoulder straps and big exterior pockets on the daypack. Previous versions of these bags used ripstop nylon. The current one uses a heavy-duty recycled polyester, which held up well during a six-week trip across Europe.
Osprey offers a lifetime warranty.
Upgrade pick
This attractive but expensive travel backpack has customizable straps and great, cushy padding. It comes in only one size, however.
The Salkan The Backpacker looks and feels like a higher-end travel backpack. The polyester cloth feels extremely rugged, and there’s extensive padding in every place the pack touches your body.
Available in black and lightish green, The Backpacker has nine color options for its exterior compression straps, so you can mix and match based on your preferences—or even change them up. This gives The Backpacker the most customizable palette of any of our picks.
While looking more stylish on TikTok and Instagram isn’t generally a primary consideration for us, overall The Backpacker feels well made, and it has many of the same thoughtful features as our top and runner-up picks, including lots of pockets, smooth zippers, and height-adjustable shoulder straps.
These are offset, however, by a much higher price. Also, the main pack is technically too large to be a carry-on for most airlines, and the bag comes in only one size. (Salkan says it’s best for people 5-foot-6 to 6-foot-4).
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